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Marketing solutions in non-production instances

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I have 3 existing Dynamics 365 CE instances (DEV/UAT/Prod), I do all my customisations in DEV and then export managed solutions and deploy into UAT and Production. I plan to use Dynamics 365 for Marketing in Production only by purchasing only 1 license. (the cost of additional licenses for DEV/UAT cannot be justified and I am satisfied that I can sufficiently test my emails/journeys in Production)

However, I would like to have the Dynamics 365 for Marketing solutions installed in all environments so that should I want to use a Marketing specific field, entity etc in my existing CE customisations I can, creating what I need in DEV and then going through the deployment process I am used to.

I realise that I can install Dynamics 365 for Marketing into DEV, then uninstall it and all the solutions are left behind. The official Microsoft advice is not to update solutions manually but given that I just want the fields/entities (and don't want Marketing to actually work) does anyone know if this is an acceptable approach? It's the only option I have to update other instances once I've installed in to Production. I'm really not bothered about Dev and UAT being connected to the external Marketing services, it's just about keeping the entity structure aligned across all instances without needing to purchase 3 marketing licenses.

How are others handling this?

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  • Verified answer
    megcda Profile Picture
    megcda 2,192 on at
    RE: Marketing solutions in non-production instances

    The official recommendation is that you have a secondary instance and no, we don't recommend updating solutions manually. You could uninstall and re-install and apply the license in the organization you would want to use (again cumbersome.) 

    So no, there isn't a supported way to accomplish this. I would suggest you put in an Idea in the Marketing Idea Forum that Microsoft should lower the cost of the secondary Marketing instances in order to make true development cycle work more reasonable.  Ideas are regularly reviewed by the PM team and votes on these have a lot of impact on decision making.

    Good luck!

    If this answered your question, please mark as Verified!

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